Mass user restart crashed Skype

Chicago (IL) – Skype today provided a few more information pieces about the reasons behind its massive network outage last week.

According to the company, the network outage was initially caused by a "massive restart of [its] user’s computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they rebooted after receiving a routine software update." That high number of reboots was followed by an equally high number of log-in requests, which resulted in what Skype calls a "chain reaction."

On the Skype blog, a company representative wrote that this event revealed a "previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm" which prevented Skype’s "self-healing function from working quickly."

"The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype," the representative wrote. "Skype has now identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring."

The company said that there were no malicious activities that impacted Skype.